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So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the
divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they
have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere;
they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun,
but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the
Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune
from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the
soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings,
associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not
descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed [as
distinguished from the kosmos] are thus far in the one place with
their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend
from the universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary
desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of
its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter
from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is
no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing,
isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment;
severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for
this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the
one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it
has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence,
it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and
tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose
inner depths it henceforth sinks far.
With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the
enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of
conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the
All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid
it hasten back.
It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing
itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through
sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of
the Soul.
But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by
a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the
shackles and soars- when only it makes its memories the starting
point of a new vision of essential being. Souls that take this
way have place in both spheres, living of necessity the life
there and the life here by turns, the upper life reigning in
those able to consort more continuously with the divine
Intellect, the lower dominant where character or circumstances
are less favourable.
All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he
distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as
"parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become
partial, they must of necessity experience birth.
Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be
understood as when he tells of God speaking and delivering
orations; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively
treated as coming into being by generation and creation: stage
and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to
things whose being and definite form are eternal.
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